Movies Like
Movies Like La La Land for a Rainy-Day Mood
By Jordan A. · · 5 min read
La La Land came out in 2016, won six Oscars including Best Director for Damien Chazelle and Best Actress for Emma Stone, and then spent about two minutes holding a Best Picture trophy it hadn't actually won before somebody found the right envelope. Justin Hurwitz wrote the score and took two of those six statues.
The reason it still gets rewatched has less to do with the dancing than with the last eight minutes. Chazelle spends two hours building a romance and then shows you, in one wordless sequence, the version of the story where everything went right, before cutting back to the version where it didn't. That's the bittersweet engine. It's why "movies like La La Land" is a harder request than it looks, because most musicals commit to the happy ending.
What follows splits into three groups: the musicals Chazelle was openly borrowing from, the films about wanting a career badly enough to wreck things, and the modern ones that get the melancholy right. A rainy Sunday will hold about two of these.
The films Chazelle was copying from
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) is the direct ancestor, and once you've seen it the debt is obvious. Jacques Demy directed, Michel Legrand wrote the music, and every single line of dialogue is sung, including small talk about petrol. Catherine Deneuve stars. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, the only French New Wave film to do so. The ending is the exact ending La La Land has, arrived at fifty years earlier, and it is devastating. Be ready for the sung-through format, which takes about ten minutes to stop feeling strange.
Singin' in the Rain (1952) was only a modest hit when MGM put it out and is now routinely named the best musical ever made. Gene Kelly co-directed with Stanley Donen and stars alongside Donald O'Connor and Debbie Reynolds, in a story about Hollywood panicking its way through the switch from silent film to sound. It holds the top spot on the American Film Institute's musicals list. It is the sunniest thing on this page and the correct antidote if La La Land left you flattened.
Moulin Rouge! (2001) is Baz Luhrmann throwing Elton John, Nirvana and Madonna at 1899 Paris and daring you to object. Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor are the leads. It won two Oscars, for art direction and costume design, from eight nominations. The editing is deliberately frantic in the first half hour and that's the part people quit on, so give it until the elephant. If you liked La La Land's willingness to be sincere and huge at the same time, this is the maximalist version.
Ambition as the actual subject
Whiplash (2014) is Chazelle's previous film and the one that got him La La Land. Miles Teller plays a jazz drummer and J.K. Simmons plays the conservatory teacher destroying him for his own good, or possibly not for his own good. It swept the Grand Jury and Audience awards at Sundance in 2014 and won three Oscars, including Best Supporting Actor for Simmons. Sebastian's whole argument about jazz in La La Land is Whiplash's argument with the volume lowered. It's on MGM Plus as of August 2026.
Babylon (2022) is Chazelle's Hollywood film with the gloves off, set in the late 1920s as silent pictures die. Brad Pitt, Margot Robbie and Diego Calva star, and Justin Hurwitz scored it again. It lost the studio a great deal of money, grossing $63.4 million against a budget near $80 million before marketing. It is vulgar, overlong and about forty percent brilliant, and the final montage is doing exactly what La La Land's epilogue does. Whether that redeems the previous three hours is genuinely a coin flip.
A Star Is Born (2018) is Bradley Cooper's directing debut and the fourth version of this story, following films in 1937, 1954 and 1976. He stars opposite Lady Gaga, with Sam Elliott as his brother. Eight Oscar nominations, one win, for the song "Shallow." The first forty five minutes are as good as anything in this genre. The back half is a much sadder film than La La Land and it does not offer you a fantasy sequence to soften it. It isn't on a US subscription service as of August 2026.
The quiet, small, musical ones
Once (2007) was made for about 112,000 euros by John Carney and stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, who were actual musicians and later formed The Swell Season. A busker and a Czech immigrant record a demo together over a few days in Dublin. "Falling Slowly" won the Oscar for Best Original Song. It has La La Land's exact ending logic and none of its budget, and the handheld camerawork is rough enough to bother some people.
Sing Street (2016) is Carney again, this time in 1980s Dublin, where a teenager starts a band mainly to impress a girl. Ferdia Walsh-Peelo and Lucy Boynton lead it, and it was nominated for the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy. The original songs are genuinely good pastiche of Duran Duran and The Cure. It's the most purely enjoyable film on this list and the least likely to make you stare at a wall afterward.
How to pick tonight
If you want the ache, The Umbrellas of Cherbourg or Once. If you want the ache with a bigger budget, A Star Is Born. If La La Land left you wanting to be cheered up rather than gutted, go with Singin' in the Rain or Sing Street, and don't overthink it. Whiplash is the one to save for a night you want to be rattled.
If you'd rather have the choice made for you, feed a few favorites into our movie recommendation tool and it will hand back a shortlist.
Topics covered: la-la-land, musical, romance, chazelle, whiplash, once, umbrellas-of-cherbourg, bittersweet
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and writes every guide on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu, and he still tests every pick the hard way: by watching it.